Multiple ship choice...waste of resources?

[Pepisolo]

After messing around with the various ship types I'm getting flashbacks to when A Valley Without Wind 2 had a choice of character designs. In AVWW2, yeah, it sounded cool to be able to pick different characters, but in the end nobody really cared about the choice, and having so many different characters really stretched Arcen's art resources and partially prevented the game from having one really nice looking character (although engine limitations also played a part iirc). I'm getting the same feeling from Starward Rogue. I've tried all the variant ships, they all look practically the same apart from some detailing, like pseudo palette swaps, they all feel pretty similar, and they are all pretty average in terms of animation quality. Why not just have one ship and concentrate on making it look and feel as awesome as possible? You could make it look smoother, have more animation frames, have ship damaged variations of the art, maybe even make some of the special weapons modular and change the art accordingly. Having one super badass ship is infinitely better than having 7 that look and feel pretty similar.

Then, in the future, you could think about having some really worthwhile alternative ships available as DLC, with significantly different designs and functionality rather than just having a mass of near identical ships with slightly different detailing and tweaked variables. 

[x4000]

Well, these ships are literally palette swaps, so they are not remotely comparable to Valley 2 (or 1) in terms of art resources.

[TheVampire100]

I would wish however that the ships would have unique abilities not only different stats.
For example the paladin could reduce incoming damage a little.

[x4000]

Eh.  It's certainly not hard to do -- literally it's a small xml script to do so.  I'm not sure how excited about that I am, but we shall see.

[Pepisolo]

Well, these ships are literally palette swaps, so they are not remotely comparable to Valley 2 (or 1) in terms of art resources.

That's weird, I thought the detailing was different and hand drawn rather than palette swapped. Or maybe my understanding of what a palette swap actually is, is wrong. In any case, so theoretically, just to be clear, if you were to want to add extra frames of animation then that would automatically apply to all other variants of the ships, and so would not be a resource problem in terms of redoing each piece of art?

[x4000]

Well, it's a bit more advanced than a palette swap, but not much.  It has multiple hue shifts and some curve shifts.  But that's nothing that can't be just put into a photoshop action and then poof it does any and all frames at once.  It's certainly not causing us to not be able to do animations or whatnot.

That said, doing animations for one ship out of hundreds and not any for the others strikes me as something that might make the others look unintentionally crappy by comparison.  There are a lot of things still to be done on all the ships anyway with taking hits and whatnot, anyhow.

[Pepisolo]

That said, doing animations for one ship out of hundreds and not any for the others strikes me as something that might make the others look unintentionally crappy by comparison.

I think to some extent that's true, although making the player ship that bit better and nicer looking than the enemies in the game seems fine to me. That's what the player is going to be looking at most of the time after all. That's actually what people seemed to want for AVWW2 (although not possible, of course). I'm pretty sure that they would have preferred a nice player character and less nice monsters with some dissonance, rather than a less nice player character and less nice monsters, but without any dissonance.

[x4000]

Well, the characters there were actively troublesome in a lot of ways, and you legitimately were looking at your character a lot.  Here you look at the room at least as much as your character, and since it's not a human I don't think the case is all that comparable.  Not to say that we shouldn't do some animations of some sorts on it, but I don't think the cases are super similar is all.

[Pepisolo]

Well, the characters there were actively troublesome in a lot of ways, and you legitimately were looking at your character a lot.  Here you look at the room at least as much as your character, and since it's not a human I don't think the case is all that comparable.  Not to say that we shouldn't do some animations of some sorts on it, but I don't think the cases are super similar is all.

Ok, ta. I'll see how things develop, how I feel after more playtime etc. Seems like there's much more scope for making changes, if necessary, compared to AVWW2. Cheers.

[x4000]

Oh yeah, it's one of those things that's not too bad.  We might do something like add little animated bits on them that are secondary images -- we have tons of flexibility for that sort of thing, too, in this system.  We could get quite complex and interesting with something like that here, heh.

[Pepisolo]

Oh yeah, it's one of those things that's not too bad.  We might do something like add little animated bits on them that are secondary images -- we have tons of flexibility for that sort of thing, too, in this system.  We could get quite complex and interesting with something like that here, heh.

Nice, sounds good.